Submitted by Chris Brookins on April 17, 2010 - 10:06pm
Yesterday we completed our pre-DrupalCon sprint and are excited to introduce several great new features, with a special focus on designers and site creators who need an awesome looking site. Specifically in this release we have added great support for professional fonts. As designers know, font selection is one key area where average web sites are separated from remarkable sites. In the past, font options for web sites were limited or complex to implement: you could create your own images with embedded expensive licensed fonts, or you could purchase, install and embed fonts yourself. Now Drupal Gardens not only gives you access to web-safe fonts, it provides easy access to many free @font-face fonts and even world-class Typekit fonts. We are happy to help a lot more people easily use great fonts in their Drupal web-sites. In addition this release includes many more enhancements to help build well-designed sites fast. Enjoy!
- Upgraded all sites to Drupal 7 Alpha 3 + all core changes through April 8. For a complete list of what is new, see the Drupal 7 Alpha 3 release notes or the raw CVS commit messages from February 21 to April 8.
- Added support for 15 additional free open-source font families. Select the appropriate @font-face font from the ThemeBuilder's font list. The selected font is downloaded to your visitor's browser using @font-face embedding. These fonts are supported in all browsers except FireFox 3.0 and earlier.
- Added support for hundreds of Typekit fonts. By signing up for a free or paid Typekit account you can select from their vast library of bulletproof, standards compliant, accessible, licensed fonts. As Typekit says 'This will change the way you design websites.'
- Added a banner image feature that supports rotating banner images. You can configure one or more images to auto or manually rotate including customizable transition effects such as slide, fade and more. You can indicate what page each image will link to as well as what messaging text to overlay on top of your image and where.
- Added a new theme called Impact. Impact is a fluid-width, modern theme with a parallax header.
- Added optional template features including a FAQ page, customer testimonials, Twitter feed, a feedback form and more. These features can also be manually enabled for existing sites.
- Added a new Product template to easily create a site promoting one or more products which includes a rotating banner, a product overview page, the Impact theme and the previously mentioned template features.
- Moved Drupal Gardens documentation to pages accessible directly on the Drupal Gardens site via the search bar on the forum, videos and help panel.
- Created simple, flexible CSS grid framework for the Impact and Campaign themes.
- Improved the performance of many ThemeBuilder operations
- Improved the performance of Login
- And of course we have fixed bugs reported by our amazing beta testers
Don't have a free Drupal Gardens account? If you haven't signed up to get a free beta code yet, please do so soon!
Comments
To find the twitter feed URL you want, just go to the twitter page and copy the link for the RSS feed. Eg. https://twitter.com/drupalgardens - on the bottom right you'll see a link for "RSS feed of drupalgardens's tweets".
Hope that helps.
- Collin